Has America Abandoned an Afghan Interpreter?

It’s hard to think of anyone more deserving of an American visa than Mohammad Janis Shinwari.

On April 28, 2008, a team of U.S. Army combat advisers left the small base they shared with Afghan troops in Ghazni Province and went out on a mission in Taliban country. Ghazni was then the most violent place in Afghanistan. First Lieutenant Matt Zeller was riding in the second of three vehicles. He had been in Afghanistan for ten days. Zeller’s team had been briefed upon arrival in Afghanistan by Major General Robert Cone, who was in charge of training the Afghan Army and police. “How many of you were in Iraq?” Cone had asked the new arrivals. “This isn’t Iraq. In Iraq, we do everything we must to win. Here, we do everything we can.”

The American advisers stopped in the district center to assess the local police station and found a mud-walled, bullet-pocked structure manned by Afghan cops who hadn’t been paid in five months. Zeller and his group were working with maps and satellite imagery from the period of Soviet occupation, and on the way back to the base they got lost. They stopped to ask directions of an Afghan farmer, who directed them down a dirt road. Within two minutes, a tremendous explosion hit the lead vehicle. Zeller assumed that the soldiers and the Afghan interpreter in it were dead—they had run over a pressure plate that detonated an anti-personnel mine stacked on top of two anti-tank mines—but the vehicle, known as an MRAP, or Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected, saved their lives. The MRAP was wrecked, and Zeller wanted to destroy and abandon it and get back to the base with his wounded comrades (they all had horrific concussions), but on the radio their battalion commander ordered him to wait for a tow truck. Americans weren’t going to leave ruined monuments to military failure lying around Afghanistan like the Soviets: If you don’t come back with that vehicle, the message was, don’t come back. (The tow truck didn’t arrive for another eight hours.)

Zeller had his team get out of the vehicles, take up defensive positions, and wait to get shot. They were on a sloping hillside at the edge of a village. Within an hour, forty-five Taliban fighters inside the village and on the surrounding ridge ambushed the Americans with mortar fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and automatic weapons. Zeller was briefly knocked unconscious three times. An hour into the fight, he was out of grenades and running low on bullets.

“I thought, This is where I die, April 28, 2008,” Zeller told me. “I die on this stupid piece of hillside because they won’t let us leave a melted-down fourteen-ton paperweight.”

A call for help reached the Quick-Reaction Force back at the base, where Janis Shinwari worked as an interpreter. He was born in Jalalabad, in 1978, which meant that Afghanistan had been at war for his entire life. In 1996, his family had fled to Pakistan to escape the rule of the Taliban, then returned, in early 2002, after their overthrow. Shinwari learned English from watching American movies; he liked the accent, and went to work for the U.S. military in 2006. He was a good shot and went out on missions armed—essentially, he was part of the combat team. “I was a trusted person,” Shinwari told me yesterday on the phone from Afghanistan. “They took me to all the dangerous missions when they knew we were going to meet the Taliban. One C.O. said, ‘You are one of us. We take you like our own team.’ ”

Shinwari grabbed his personal AK-47 and joined the rescue mission. On arrival at the firefight, he found Zeller, whom he’d met only the week before, lying alone on a grave in a dirt cemetery, fifty feet away from the vehicles, firing his machine gun. “He was in the first line,” Shinwari said. “That was the kill zone.”

Zeller was dimly aware that someone had jumped into his foxhole. Then, right behind his head, he heard a burst of AK-47 fire. A hundred and fifty yards behind him, two Taliban had crept around a building and were about to shoot him in the back, when Shinwari took aim and killed them before dragging Zeller back to the vehicles.

Zeller was awarded a Purple Heart for his bravery. But it was Shinwari’s action that most impressed him, and a few days later he asked his new Afghan friend, “Why are you on our side?” Shinwari, whose wife was pregnant with their first child, explained that he wanted his family to have a better life, which meant keeping the Taliban out of power.

“What if that doesn’t work out?” Zeller asked. Shinwari answered that he would then have to leave Afghanistan again.

Interpreting at village meetings or during interrogations of Taliban prisoners, Shinwari made no effort to hide his face. Zeller once asked him why. “I want them to know me,” Shinwari said. “I don’t scare for them.” He was a striking man, tall and long-haired, and it seemed that everyone in Ghazni knew who he was, and inevitably his name made it onto a Taliban death list. He began getting threats in the form of “night letters”—his head would be cut off, one said. At the end of 2008, as Zeller prepared to leave Afghanistan, he told Shinwari, “You’re a brother, you’re family. Whatever I can do to get you to the U.S., I will.” Shinwari assumed that the Americans would stay in Afghanistan forever, so after Congress passed a law creating visas for Afghans who worked for the United States in Afghanistan, he didn’t apply for one. But, for his own safety, he asked to be transferred to Camp Blackhorse, a base in Kabul, where he began living in the interpreters’ village, visiting his wife and two children just once or twice a month.

In 2011, Shinwari realized that the Americans were going to leave some day, after all, and maybe soon. He applied for a Special Immigrant Visa. Zeller wrote a letter of recommendation and agreed to be the family’s sponsor. Then, like thousands of other Afghans who took the almost suicidal risk of working for the U.S., and like thousands of Iraqis in the same position, Shinwari waited. He couldn’t have known that in February, 2011, the entire S.I.V. program had ground to a halt in Washington, because two Iraqi refugees in Kentucky—neither had had anything to do with the Americans in Iraq—were arrested on terrorism charges. The issuance of visas to Iraqis and Afghans who were already as thoroughly background-checked and fingerprinted and retina-scanned and polygraphed as any applicants in the world, and who had already passed up numerous chances to kill Americans in their own countries, stopped. The White House, the State Department, Homeland Security, and the intelligence agencies tried to come up with a new vetting formula. The interagency gears barely moved. Shinwari waited a year, two years.

This past July, he got word that Camp Blackhorse would shut down in November. After that, it will be turned over to the Afghan Army, with no Americans around, which will mean that the Afghan interpreters will no longer be safe. When he got the news, Shinwari was responsible for managing two hundred interpreters, and every single one of them had applied for an S.I.V. He sent a message to Zeller, who was working as a consultant in Northern Virginia and serving in the Army reserve, telling him what was happening. He signed off,

brother I sent that form

i don’t know if you got it or no

salam

Zeller, who had also been waiting patiently in the belief that a man so obviously deserving of a visa would soon receive one, thought, The hell with this, I can’t stand it any more. He contacted his representatives in Congress, and Senator Tim Kaine wrote a personal letter to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. He started a petition on Change.org, and within a week it had received a hundred thousand signatures. He alerted various media outlets.

And, on September 3rd, Shinwari was suddenly informed that he and his family had been approved. He went to the American Embassy, where an immigrant visa was glued to his passport. He quit his job at Camp Blackhorse, said goodbye, and, after seven years of service to the U.S. Army, received a certificate of appreciation. He sold his house, his mattresses, his dishes, his car, his TV, and his radio—almost all his worldly goods—and moved his family to his father-in-law’s house for the two-week interval before the flight to Virginia, “because I thought I was going to a new country and starting a new life.”

This past Saturday morning, around eleven Kabul time, Shinwari got a phone call from the Embassy. “There is some problem with your visa,” an official said. “Can you bring it back today?”

“What kind of problem?”

The official wouldn’t say. Shinwari went to his computer and checked the status of his case. His and his wife’s applications had reverted from “ready” to “administrative processing” (his two children were still listed as “ready,” but yesterday they, too, went back to “administrative processing”). He called Zeller to report that his visa had been revoked. Zeller urged him not to present his passport at the Embassy, because the visa page would be stamped “cancelled,” and then he would return to bureaucratic limbo. Shinwari, with no job or possessions, no future, went into hiding. He wondered if some Taliban had sent an anonymous e-mail to the embassy to sabotage his case at the last minute.

Of the eight thousand seven hundred and fifty visas created for Afghan interpreters, just a thousand one hundred and fourteen have been issued. In the five years of the Iraqi S.I.V. program, eight thousand out of twenty-five thousand have gone through. So far this year, the number for Iraqis is down around three hundred sixty. As of September 30th, the Iraq program is scheduled to end, with thousands of visa slots unfilled. In July, the House passed a bill that would extend the program, with an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 420-3, nothing short of miraculous in this Congress. But the bill won’t come to the Senate floor until December, and, meanwhile, it stands to die in the House, where Republicans just passed a budget whose single priority is the defunding of Obamacare. Iraqis who attached their fates to the U.S. government in Iraq stand to be casualties of a U.S. government shutdown in Washington.

I asked Becca Heller, of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, why so few visas have been issued. “It’s not nefarious,” she said. “It’s just a total lack of political will.” Kirk Johnson, who founded The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, has just published a searing account of his years working on this issue, “To Be a Friend Is Fatal.” In it, he writes, “I have yet to meet an Iraqi interpreter who can’t rattle off the names of several slain colleagues. If George Bush or Barack Obama had been willing to exercise leadership, many of them would have been saved, but instead bureaucracies under each president’s control continue to regard these friends as potential enemies. They do this, they say, to protect us against terrorists, who hate us for our values.”

America seems poised to replicate its shame from Iraq in Afghanistan. Matt Zeller has spent the days since Saturday frantically trying to get someone in the U.S. government to explain what happened to his friend Janis Shinwari. An official at the Kabul Embassy referred him to an e-mail address, from which he received this reply:

The Refugee Processing Center only handles resettlement benefit processing for SIV applicants; we do not issue visas and cannot provide information on the status of an applicant’s visa.

We encourage Mr. Shinwari to follow-up with the embassy regarding his visa status.

Kind regards

After hearing from a human being at the State Department, Zeller wrote back and vented his frustration: “Does he have to totally reapply? Is his packet back in the abyss that is Administrative Review/Security Adjudication? Is he forever ineligible for a US visa? He may just be a name and number to the broader government, but to me, he is family. He saved my life.”